标签: integrated circuits

When I was a young lad in England in the early 1970s, I used to read a monthly electronics hobbyist magazine called Practical Electronics . When I say "read" I really mean "devour!" When the time was coming close for a new issue to hit the stands, I would visit the newsagent every day after school pleading "Has it arrived yet?" As soon as the magazine did arrive I read it cover to cover, and then I jumped on a bus to visit my local electronics store to purchase the components required to build one of that month's projects (my favorite series was called "Take Twenty" in which each project had fewer than 20 components and cost less than 20 shillings). Many of the projects in those days employed 7400-series TTL integrated circuits. This family of components contained hundreds of devices that provided everything from basic logic gates and flip-flops to more sophisticated elements like counters and decoders and even simple Arithmetic Logic Units (ALUs). This was, to a large extent, how I learned the fundamentals of digital electronics. Also, because this is what I was learning with, it made perfect sense to me that you could have a silicon chip containing four 2-input NAND gates (the 7400) or four 2-input NOR gates (the 7402). Time passed (as is its wont) and I met older engineers who had grown up creating digital logic circuits using discrete transistors resistors, and capacitors. It amazed me that many of these folks simply couldn't wrap their brains around the use of digital integrated circuits. (And don't even get me started talking about the analog-digital divide.) Over the years I've come to see this many times. I've met guys who grew up working with vacuum tubes who couldn't make the transition to semiconductors – they found the high-tension supplies associated with the tubes easier to understand than the low-voltage power supplies used by transistors. I've also met folks who understood the use of basic digital chips but who couldn't get to grips with the concept of simple 8bit microprocessors. And there are folks who were experts with 8bit microprocessors and assembly language who find themselves overwhelmed by 32bit and 64bit processors and high-level programming languages. I must admit that I've started to wonder if this will one day happen to me – is there some new technology on the horizon that will leave me baffled and bewildered...  

The How Things Work group on Yahoo is moving from one topic to another with the agility of a mountain goat. Someone just gave a link to an article along with this message saying "This is an amazing piece of work that seems to have no history." Since I love robots and the subject of the message was "Interesting robot dog from the 1950s" I just had to bounce over there and take a look ( Click here to see the article). It seems that Daniel C. Dennett – a professor at Tufts University in Massachusetts – spotted this unusual robot dog in a shop in France and he quickly snapped it up. (I don't blame him – if I'd seen something like this I would have bought it without thinking.) This is just so amazingly cool. It's almost a retro version of Doctor Who's robot dog K-9 (I remember thinking K-9 was so cool when I was a kid ... but truth to tell I'm glad he's no longer with the Doctor apart from the occasional guest appearance). But let's not wander off into the weeds... take a look at the picture below and see what you think:   So now the big question is "Who made this little beauty and why?" I would also like to know just what it's capable of, because it looks much too sophisticated for a radio controlled model. It appears to pre-date integrated circuits, so I'm assuming that it's transistor-based and uses analog environmental detection (proximity, touch, light, sound?) and control functions. Ooooh! I would love to get my hands on this...

The How Things Work group on Yahoo is jumping from topic to topic with the agility of a mountain goat. Someone just provided a link to an article along with a brief message saying "This is an amazing piece of work that seems to have no history." Since I love robots and the subject of the message was "Interesting robot dog from the 1950s" I just had to bounce over there and take a look ( Click here to see the article). It seems that Daniel C. Dennett – a professor at Tufts University in Massachusetts – spotted this unusual robot dog in a shop in France and he quickly snapped it up. (I don't blame him – if I'd seen something like this I would have bought it without thinking.) This is just so amazingly cool. It's almost a retro version of Doctor Who's robot dog K-9 (I remember thinking K-9 was so cool when I was a kid ... but truth to tell I'm glad he's no longer with the Doctor apart from the occasional guest appearance). But let's not wander off into the weeds... take a look at the picture below and see what you think:   So now the big question is "Who made this little beauty and why?" I would also like to know just what it's capable of, because it looks much too sophisticated for a radio controlled model. It appears to pre-date integrated circuits, so I'm assuming that it's transistor-based and uses analog environmental detection (proximity, touch, light, sound?) and control functions. Ooooh! I would love to get my hands on this...  

The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has mandated that the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standard meet 54.5 miles/gallon by 2025 (so many significant figures in that goal—the precision is truly admirable!). Before you say "huh?", note that this goal has many loopholes, subclauses, and qualifiers, befitting a number set by bureaucrats, see here . I'm not here to argue about the virtue of higher fuel-economy standards—that's a topic for another time—but to say that setting technical goals by such mandates is at odds with the genuine path of research, development, and product reality. It's nice to have goals, of course, but when they become "meet them or else", it's almost like trying to mandate that ã = 3.0 because that makes things so much easier. How did we get into this situation? I see several reasons: - First, technologists (engineers, scientists, manufacturing) have actually achieved so many technical "miracles" over the past few decades that we have made almost anything look doable and easy. Look back 40, 30, 20 or even 10 years at the state of consumer electronics, or technology infrastructure, and you'll be stunned. Long story short : we've done it to ourselves, yet another unintended consequence of past successes. - Second, the lure of the big-grant funding for RD, mostly from the government, has spawned a symbiotic relationship. One side says, "here's a lot of money, can you get to us where we want to go?" and the industry and academics responds, "you give us the money and we'll get you there, no problem." - Finally, we did it to ourselves. How so? Largely by publically hyping the industry "road map", initially promoted by semiconductor vendors such as Intel, but now a standard part of almost any technology story. Sure, it's essential to have one internally for planning purposes, but it has had, IMO, very adverse external consequences due to the mindset it has established. What the road map says is that we know where we are going, we know how to get there, and it's just a matter of applying ourselves, spending the money, hiring the people, working hard and diligently and—poof!—we'll get there, no problem. It makes RD and progress seem very linear, deterministic, and straightforward. Reality is that progress has hope, anticipation, false starts, diversions, random walks, insurmountable barriers, and major disruptive developments. The vacuum-tube roadmap of 1950 did not show transistors; the transistor roadmap of 1955 did not show integrated circuits. In a word: stuff happens, both good and bad, while you are following your road map and promising to get to the Emerald City at the end. Mandates and directives don't change this reality. Keep this in mind next time the bureaucrats and legislators mandate where a technology and product will be at a certain time, and what it will do. Have you ever had this experience? Has it been reasonable or ridiculous?